Measurement focuses our attention on what's important. For our measures to best serve our management needs, our measuring instruments must be meaningful, scientifically calibrated, mathematically rigorous, and universally traceable to uniform reference standards.
And there lies the rub. It is increasingly evident that the traditional conception of land and labor as capital resources is insufficient to today's tasks of environmental and social sustainability. How are we to quantify and manage on a global scale the natural environment's air, water, and food supply services? Humanity's health, literacy, and productivity? Or the trust, loyalty, and commitment necessary for even the most basic social contracts?
New technologies are making it possible to calibrate instruments for measuring living natural, human, and social capital to previously unheard of degrees of meaningfulness and precision.
Living human, social, and natural capital metrics will be of vital
importance in supporting the needs of consumers making purchasing
decisions, managers making staffing decisions, quality assessors making
improvement decisions, investors making financing decisions, and judges
making legal decisions. Technical reference standards have been
essential to the emergence of new market economies at each stage in
their development, from local to regional to global. When we can all
think together in the common languages of the things we want to nurture
and grow, we will be better able to marshall our collective
intelligence and energy for the purposes of creating sustainable
livelihoods for ourselves and the generations to come.
Living Capital Metrics can help you design, calibrate, and deploy the tools you need for measuring and managing any form of natural, human, or social capital. To find out more, contact us today: info@livingcapitalmetrics.com.
Copyright 1995-2009 Living Capital Metrics Last updated December 21, 2009.
